`Bellmer’s first doll, which he constructed with the help of his brother Fritz, his wife Marguerite, and Lotte Pritzel in 1933, stood around four-and-a-half feet tall. She was made in the image of an adolescent girl. His young cousin Ursula Naguschewski, to whom he had developed a strong attachment, was one inspiration for the figure. Ursula was allowed to look at the doll from a distance but not to cross the threshold of the studio. The doll was fabricated out of glue-hardened towand plaster of Paris over a metal and wooden armature, hand-carved with a rasp and wood-chisel. Her body parts, which included two torsos, two legs, and one arm, could be freely disassembled and interchanged. “I tried to rearrange the sexual elements of a girl’s body like a sort of plastic anagram,” Bellmer explained later. “I remember describing it thus: the body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it, so that its real nature becomes clear through a series of anagrams.” Initially he had also intended to “display a girl’s thoughts and dreams” in a miniature diorama viewed through the doll’s navel controlled by a button concealed in her nipple, but he abandoned the idea because of its technical difficulties. This “panorama” would have shown “small objects, materials and color pictures distinguished by bad taste,” including “a boat sinking amid the ice-floes of the North Pole, a handkerchief ‘embellished’ with little girl’s spittle, sweets and kitsch prints for children.”
[...] He asks whether his doll “didn’t … amount to the final triumph over those young girls—with their wide eyes and averted looks—when a conscious gaze plundered its charms, when aggressive fingers searching for something malleable allowed the distillates of mind and senses slowly to take form, limb by limb?” There is a whiff of exorcism here—a settling of scores with the ghosts of longings past—reminiscent of Kokoschka’s Alma-doll, who ended up, after all that love and attention had been lavished on her, decapitated and drenched in red wine at the bottom of the garden. “Fit one joint to the other, swivel the ball-joints full circle and test them for childlike poses,” Bellmer ends:
Gently trace the hollows, savor the pleasures of the curves, stray into the opening of an ear, do pretty things while simultaneously scattering the salt of deformation with a hint of vengeance. Above all, one must not stop short of the interior, of stripping away coy girlish thoughts so that their foundations become visible, best of all through the navel, deep within the belly in the form of a panorama electrically illuminated by colored lights. Isn’t that the solution?` <$&^__@&*()>
